The Killing Fields

It would be cheaply comforting to look at the photographs of lynched black and white men and women--from Arkansas to Minnesota, from Mississippi to California--in "Without Sanctuary" and shake one's head only at racist white Southerners. "Racism" is a reassuring explanation because we're now taught that it can easily be exorcised by that anodyne notion of "tolerance." There's a danger in over-explaining lynching, for as G.L. Godkin of The Nation wrote in 1893, "man is the one animal that is capable of getting enjoyment out of the torture and death of members of its own species. We venture to assert that seven-eighths of every lynching party is composed of pure, sporting mob, which goes . . . just as it goes to a cockfight or prize-fight, for the gratification of the lowest and most degraded instincts of humanity." (And anyone who believes this behavior is peculiar to a racist America should examine the lynchings in, to name a few societies, ancient Greece and Republican Rome, and traditional Germany, Corsica, China, Nigeria and East Africa.)

Looking at the photographs of the broken, burned and mutilated victims in "Without Sanctuary"--some of whom, themselves, undoubtedly committed atrocious crimes--the terrible truth, the only "explanation" of lynching, is that given half a chance, too many men will act brutally.